Workflow Simulation for Operational Decision Support using

Abstract. Simulation is widely used as a tool for analyzing business processes but is mostly focused on examining rather abstract steady-state situations. Such analyses are helpful for the initial design of a business process but are less suitable for operational decision making and contin-uous improvement. Here we describe a simulation system for operational decision support in the context of workflow management. To do this we exploit not only the workflow’s design, but also logged data describing the system’s observed historic behavior, and information extracted about the current state of the workflow. Making use of actual data capturing the current state and historic information allows our simulations to ac-curately predict potential near-future behaviors for different scenarios. The approach is supported by a practical toolset which combines and ex-tends the workflow management system YAWL and the process mining framework ProM